The Not-so-great Migration

That's me above the bowl, hoping I don't wind up flopping around
gasping for air, a totally different, unintended metaphor. 

I am migrating the site to a new platform over at Wordpress, in hopes that the added production value will push my readership into the triple digits! 

Soon I'll be monetizing my grief and I'll have a sparkling Instagram-inspired line of widowed men's lingerie. Here's the new site address:

https://wordpress.com/view/postmortempost.wordpress.com

Thanks to everyone who's read the silly stuff I write over here and thanks in advance for following me over to Wordpress. 

XOJD

The Hunt for Red Faced Self-Forgiveness

The other night the boys and I watched The Hunt for Red October. What could be better than movie night on a rainy November Friday? We took a circuitous approach to the boys’ introduction to the Jack Ryan saga. First, I fell asleep at about 6:40 pm. I ordered Chinese takeout, we ate, I cleaned up the kitchen, and barely made it to my mattress before passing out in full drool-accumulation position. This has become something of an unfortunate occasional ritual for me. I exhaust myself with lack of regular sleep and my self-imposed existential self-flagellation during the week so that staying upright until it’s dark outside becomes a major challenge by Friday. Even in November. 

Fortunately, I’d already set the boys up with dessert and a film to watch: Twilight. They missed the whole series, being too young when it came out and not the core demographic for teen vampire romances. But Freddy asked about it, so I figured why not? About twenty minutes into the movie they appeared in my doorway saying vampire romance was BORING and could they please watch something else. From the foggy depths of semi-consciousness, I suggested Hunt for Red October. “Submarines, spies, stuff blowing up, lots of action and suspense” I managed before turning over and soaking the other end of my king-sized pillow with saliva. 

I awoke in a daze 20 minutes later and stumbled into the family room. Both boys were huddled under blankets on the couch as Jack Ryan presented his defection theory to some D.C. power brokers and James Earl Jones looked younger than I ever remember him being. I joined them for the remainder of the movie. Freddy immediately started peppering me with questions about the Cold War. 

Actually they were questions about what the hell was going on in the movie, but they all pertained to the Cold War in one way or another because, I quickly realized, the film is virtually incomprehensible without that cultural backdrop – the concept of “defecting” was totally alien to kids, and they wanted to know all the significant battles of the Cold War and who won. What do you say to that? Korea? Angola? Ethiopia? Vietnam? All of Central and South America? 

I asked Freddy why he had turned on the closed captioning for a movie in English. He said it was because he was having trouble understanding the dialogue. I asked if the subtitles helped and he said “some.” What’s wrong with these kids? Haven’t they seen War Games? Red Dawn? No Way Out? Rocky IV? Turns out 1980s brink of nuclear disaster diplomacy and espionage lingo isn’t self-evident to Today’s Child. 

Kids today just don't know their oily, well-muscled geopolitical history. 

About ten minutes after I sat down, Benny got kid-tired fidgety. Changing positions, playing with the blanket, asking random questions aloud to the room pertaining to the animal kingdom rather than submarine warfare or Cold War diplomacy. I asked if he was tired and he said “I don’t think I can make it to the end of Red October, Dad,” which was adorably predictable. I reminded him that we’d already just reached early November, but Benny, who normally humors even my worst puns, was too tired to even roll his eyes. I had him lay down against me and within about five minutes I felt his body go slack and his breathing slow down. He was fast asleep, despite the depth charges exploding on the screen only a few feet away. 

It was in many ways the best of all possible Fridays. Sure, there is always an absent center in our home life and huddling on the couch as a threesome instead of a quartet highlights that to some extent. But, apart from the immutable fact of our loss, cuddling on the couch with the boys and watching a not terrible movie I’ve seen before is something even I can’t find much to complain about. In fact, I remember thinking to myself as we watched the film how fortunate it was the boys hung amicably with each other despite my somnolent absence. 

They're still cute...

Speaking of sleepiness, the movie wasn’t finished until after ten, by which time Benny had been asleep a long while and Freddy was getting a bit tired-cranky. Nothing major, but he gave Benny’s limp, overlapping leg a shove when he got up from the couch, shot a dirty look when Benny didn’t immediately wake up (he’d taken over drool duty from me). I cautioned: “don’t spoil a pleasant night; be nice; golden rule, remember?” But, sure enough, as I repaired to my bedroom, I heard the tell-tale sounds of Benny screaming in exaggerated agony and Freddy shouting through tears of anger and frustration. After letting it go for a minute or so, during which time it only escalated, I went upstairs, separated them, and read The Riot Act (abbr. late night version). They went to bed with tear stains on their faces and unspoken insults choking in their throats (or escaping my notice in the blissful decorum of my master sweeeeet). 

...when they're not screaming at each other.

As I threw myself back into my briar patch of a bed, I replayed a scene in my head from earlier in the week. It was breakfast and Benny was being uber-spacy – musing idly into the void when he had yet to get ready for school. It’s been a point of emphatic contention for us: I’m trying to get him to do his own basic tasks without being asked, to avoid me nagging and him forgetting his necessaries. It’s going haltingly at best. For no reason particular to that day’s episode, I lost my temper. 

I yelled at Benny instead of doing any number of things I know would have been more effective: ignore it altogether; gently remind or redirect; ask him if he’s got everything ready instead of scolding him for not being ready; let him express his frustrations before trying to steer him the right way. These are all good techniques and I’ve used them before with varying degrees of success. Not this time. I just lost it. It’s a thing that happens with me, particularly when I’m feeling threadbare, tired, or overwhelmed. 

The problem is: I use those adjectives to describe my mental state way too often these days. I mean, who isn’t threadbare, tired, or overwhelmed and is raising two kids? (If it’s you, well, congratulations, but I also sort of hate you? #sorrynotsorry) Not only are my struggles not valid excuses, they're just practically unhelpful. 

I don’t know how to parent, but I especially don’t know how to parent my own weaknesses. I believe the truism that kids learn a lot more by watching us than from anything we say to them directly. Heck, if my kids learned from what I tell them directly, they’d be the neatest, most respectful, responsible, highly emotionally developed children in the Western Hemisphere. They are MUCH better at adopting all of my worst leadings by example than they are internalizing any of my sententious parental sermonizing. 

How do you keep a nine year old from throwing tantrums when you sometimes have them yourself? How do you teach an eleven year old not to act out of anger or frustration when your impulse is sometimes “emotional Hulk smash feelings first, fix feelings later?” 

One of the ways I really like to make myself feel terrible is by ruminating on the fact that, of all the things that will affect the way my kids develop into adults, a huge portion of them are probably unknowable to me, at least in terms of their relative importance. It’s like piloting a submarine with no training. Sure, the ocean’s a big place, you could set off in a random direction and go for days without hitting anything, even in a massive Typhoon Class ship. But do you really want the first sign of a collision to be the walls of Reykjanes Ridge piercing the hull?

Despite his training & experience,
 Dr. Petrov's is not the face of
calm self assurance. 

I’m not the Captain Marko Ramius of parenting. I’m more like Tim Curry’s Doctor Petrov – along for the ride, seemingly in charge of something, clever enough to get a plum assignment from the Soviet Navy, yet completely oblivious to every single plot development of any significance, and utterly wrong on the conclusions I draw from my own observations (I’m not saying he should have known about the defection plan, but didn’t he at least suspect something was up when they let EVERY other officer stay for tea and asked him to go on some invented errand?! He’s a doctor! Educated! A man of science!).  

I read books and articles about parenting. I talk to my friends about it. I even Mr. Robot style talk to you about it through this blog in hopes this will serve as some sort of parenting stress release valve. I even try to think ahead, to plot a course we can follow through the lugubrious depths of child development technique. But at the end of the day – at least some days – I still screw it up. 

Scott Glenn's glasses are enough of a reason to watch the movie again.
And a good enculturation vehicle for teaching the boys about the 1980s. 

Ultimately, I guess what I’m looking for -- and hoping for everyone else I know parenting kids, especially those doing it alone -- is a good way to not just give myself a break, which is essential, but also a how-to on really believing I deserve it. You know, like Capt. Bart Mancuso when he figures out Jack Ryan played him by “knowing” Ramius always crazy Ivans to starboard in the bottom half of the hour. Or, in case you fell asleep an hour before that scene, like a nine year old whose dad yells at him sometimes but still knows how loved he is and won’t wind up at the bottom of a sea of emotional wreckage.  

Sunday Book Review: Anxiety the missing stage of grief, by Claire Bidwell-Smith

It's not the NYT, but it IS Sunday, and this IS a book review, so as Benny would say:
"it's not false advertising if I think it's true, Freddy!"

A few months ago Claire Bidwell Smith sent me a copy of her latest book -- Anxiety: the missing stage of grief. Full disclosure: I’ve never met Claire, but we have friends in common and her husband is close to Nina’s extended family. None of this was a factor in my assessment of the book. I have no stake except as a reader in the demographic the author is targeting. But still, cards on the table. 

First a spoiler: I have little criticism to offer. The book is practical, well-written, clear, and provides helpful resources beyond the text. I recommend it to anyone who has experienced the loss of a love one, regardless of whether your chief issue is anxiety. 

In fact, that’s my critical angle for this book. I never thought of myself as an anxious person. Nina battled generalized anxiety for years, she had panic attacks worrying that she had a brain tumor or that the kids had some hidden regressive, degenerative conditions. She worried herself sick until she learned to control it and still fought off anxiety despite artfully deploying all the cognitive behavioral tools at her disposal – that is until she was diagnosed with cancer. 

When Nina’s cancer happened, and particularly when it became terminal, she realized that this was the heretofore Terrible Thing she'd long dreaded. She also realized that, while it was terrible, it was just a new twist in her existing life, not some worm hole opening up to the terror dimension. She handled it much as she’d handled everything else up to that point, with a deep consideration for the impact on those around her and curiosity about the meaning to be drawn or created from this turn of events. 

By contrast, I never felt anxiety was an issue for me. Depression, sure. Anger, frustration, compulsive behavior. Hosts of other thigs. Enough to keep my psychotherapist from worrying about his golden years. But when it came to worrying, I always just figured why bother? 

When it becomes an issue, I’ll deal with it. As I read this book, though, I started to realize a lot of what I’d ascribed to “other issues” was really just a manifestation of anxiety. My “what, me, worry?” wasn’t so much a predisposition not to worry, but an unconscious decision to defer anxiety. 

There are a lot of ways to avoid dealing with anxiety, or even identifying it. 

If there’s any thing critical I can say about the book it’s that doesn’t contain any startling revelations or bold new theories. It is a clever synthesis of a lot of contemporary thinking on grief and anxiety. But that’s not exactly a criticism; to me it’s one of the book’s chief strengths. Ms. Bidwell Smith isn’t selling this book as a cutting edge discovery of profound genius. In fact, she appears to have very little ego involved in her project, which makes it both more digestible and effective.

Not only does she use her own struggle with grief-related anxiety as an example in the text, she defers to several experts in areas that run outside her own (she is a licensed therapist and sees grieving patients for a living). This not only lends credibility to her as a narrator and guide, it enriches the text with contributions from some really interesting voices speaking directly to the book’s themes – and they’re not just citations from other works, but also interviews Ms. Bidwell Smith conducted expressly for the book. 

Ms. Bidwell Smith’s organizing concept is guiding readers through the process of recognizing how integral anxiety can be to the grieving process. I found this concept annoying at first. It seemed to me at the outset that this was too forced, that perhaps the author was over-ascribing to anxiety what simply may have been part of the grief. 

But as I read the book I recognized two things: 1. I have a lot more anxiety than I am aware or ready to admit; and 2. Anxiety is fairly ubiquitous – it may not always be pathological or a diagnosable psychological condition – sometimes it may even help us succeed or keep us sharp -- but it is a fundamental part of human life. 

I picked up the book at what felt like a really optimal time for me. It has been 20 months today since Nina died. For the first few months after she died I felt intense grief, but also like I had a clear mission. It was about survival, but also the tangible things that had to get done: Social Security, death certificates, childcare arrangements, correspondence with friends and loved ones. Then there was Nina’s book, a whole other mission in itself. 

But that flurry of grief and loss related activity slowed and ended. Now I’m in the phase of grief where the immediacy of loss in way back in the rear-view mirror, yet the whole normalization of the world around me still doesn’t feel quite right. I am plagued by the loneliness of not having Nina and not even being ready to have a new relationship (though I tried, unsuccessfully, which only made my situation worse and more lonely). I worry about my parenting and the long-term viability of my plans for raising the boys by myself, both emotionally and practically. 

This book brought me back to the fundamentals and walked me through some basic, well-designed exercises that I badly needed. I already knew the material pretty well, either from my own experience with death and dying or from Nina’s anxiety trials and errors. But even the stuff I felt I knew best was presented in a helpful way – manageably, clearly – that got me to re-approach it afresh from the perspective of my current circumstances—a place I’ve never been before. 

Ms. Bidwell Smith does a great job of breaking down basic psychological concepts and techniques for the reader – guided meditation, cognitive behavioral approaches, death and dying preparedness, writing as a therapeutic tool -- but she also supplements these with firsthand accounts from her own experience or that of her patients (several of whom volunteered their case studies in interviews for the book). These concrete examples serve to punctuate the lessons in the book and tie them concretely to the author’s practice, which is a helpful reminder both of her ethos and the fact that all of these techniques and concepts are practical – they’re meant to be actively worked upon. The book is not an in-depth study, but rather a guide to accessing a set of practices, organized around the theme of grief induced anxiety. 

One of the final chapters in the book is on death planning – a subject of almost universal human avoidance. As a lawyer, I can attest firsthand to the fact that MANY of my colleagues, even some of those who do estate planning for a living, sometimes have done no advance planning for their own deaths. There is also a chapter on ultimate belief (or religion). I will simply say that, as one of the most fiercely agnostic people I know, I was engaged and not one bit put off by this chapter, which simply engages with the questions that many people have surrounding meaning and the end of life without presenting or assuming any dogmatic answers (or skidding off the road into the new-age or the occult).  

What ultimately made Anxiety: the missing stage of grief a success for me as a reader was that it resonated in the details. It’s hard to fake a good understanding of grief and loss to someone who’s been through it. I found myself nodding in agreement at several passages, including this one about narrative – telling the story of grief – and the passage of time: 

The further you are from the loss, the broader the brush strokes become, but when I see clients who are in the first year or two of loss, they are still holding on quite closely to the small details that led up to the actual death. They tell me about the date their mom first discovered a tumor, the name of the first doctor she went to and the second and the third doctors, the medications, the surgeries, and a complete blow-by-blow account of the complicated aftermath that ensued. Each of the last painful days is described in detail, often concluding with a shake of the head, expressing disbelief that any of it even happened at all. 

Every moment is important to tell in the beginning … even though we can never really change the outcome, it helps to tell these stories anyway as a way of understanding and accepting them.

When Nina died I was tasked with writing an epilogue for her memoir. Not only was I nervous about writing it (the book was such an amazing accomplishment and I am not a writer, let alone a writer of Nina’s caliber), but I was also in the immediate wake of her death. In retrospect, I was in a kind of shock. Watching her die was painful, probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it left a profound impression on me. My first draft of the “epilogue” was between 3,000-5000 words and described Nina’s death in EXCRUTIATING detail. I hadn’t looked at it since back in 2017 when I wrote it, but it’s really something. 

When I showed it to a friend who offered to read it before I submitted to the publisher, he gently suggested removing some of the more intense material but refrained – out of delicacy, not editorial acumen -- from giving an honest assessment of what it would mean to append something like that to Nina’s gorgeous memoir. When I sent it to the publisher the response was – thank goodness – more succinct and direct. While they appreciated the hyper-naturalist Zolaesque approach (in both volume and gory detail) of my post-traumatic stress writing, we ultimately went in another direction so as not to ruin Nina’s manuscript and spare latent PTSD sufferers any harm from reading what I’d written. 

I did my best to make Zola proud by writing things that made the few forced to read them sick with horror. 

My first draft epilogue was an obvious misstep in terms of the book, but as Ms. Bidwell Smith recognizes in her new book, it was vital to me at the time to find a narrative for my grief trauma – even if it was one that mercifully few people would ultimately read. In retrospect, I’m quite sure writing all 4,000 of those words helped me enormously by giving me a channel to pour all of my overwhelming feelings into. It is this type of exercise (though not necessarily involving your dead spouse’s publisher) that the author endorses, and this type of trauma she recognizes so keenly that made the book so worthwhile for me. It was at once validating of my experience as a grieving person, a helpful reminder of some lessons and techniques I’d forgotten or got away from, and an introduction to some new material that helped me. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s lost someone they love.